The God Fire in Our Individual Consciousness

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may god fire the heart with his presence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, The Over-soul weaves in and out of the mystery of God like a tiger lunging for meal in a galloping herd of prey. The God we worship is indeed the God that we become. There are multitudinous levels of consciousness that thrive in the value climate of our psychological reality. Various beliefs are formed and they are diverse and alien. Beliefs create images that lurk in myths as well as the imagination. People become what they perceive the self to be and wallow in thoughts of a God who abides by traditions and the rhetoric of religions.

Emerson understood that consciousness is like an ocean. As temperatures in different depths change, the color changes as well as the flora and fauna that thrive in their own value climate. We too experiences quality changes as our value climate expresses the distortions and limitations of our outer senses, but our inner senses are not distort. They inhabit our psychological value climate and see through the camouflage of our physical patterns as well as the flow of our distorted patterns and beliefs.

Our camouflage patterns follow the basic rules of our inner universe but reflect them in a distorted and convoluted manner. When we concentrate on and plunge into our inner value climate we dive below our own beliefs and look up and see a foundationless, floating group of beliefs that are enriched with shifting illusions caused by the wind of a non-egotistical will. When this value climate is experienced the most minute to the most gigantic spectrum of knowing becomes the god fire in our individual consciousness.